Book Review:
Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?
by Norman Malcolm
edited with a response by Peter Winch
copyright 1993 by Ruth Malcolm
Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York
ISBN 0-8014-2978-1 (hardback) 192pp incl. index
Review copyright by Flash qFiasco, http://www.flashq.org
A shorter version of this article appeared in International Journal of Philos. Studies,
March 1996 Vol.4 No.1.
I
Wittgenstein was a profoundly troubled man. Some of his earliest known writings--the letters to Engelmann from 1916--reveal his wretchedness and lack of faith. No
systematic expression of Wittgenstein's views on religion have come to light, nor is it
likely that any hitherto unknown theological treatise lies buried in the as yet unpublished
portions of the Nachlass. What we have are tantalizing remarks scattered throughout
the Nachlass, and equally tantalizing fragments from conversations he had with friends.
The longest continuous prose piece is the Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough--but this
shows not so much Wittgenstein's views on religion, as his views of someone else's
view of some other religion, neither Frazer's nor Wittgenstein's. Drury declared that
there were dimensions to Wittgenstein's work which were being neglected--an ethical,
mystical, or religious dimension. Scholarly interest is quickening in this other dimension
to Wittgenstein's work, and Malcolm's book comes opportunely.
"This essay by Norman Malcolm was the last piece of philosophical work he was
able to complete before his death.... The word 'complete' needs qualification. He did
indeed bring the essay so far that he was willing to have it published. Indeed, he attached so much importance to the subject that I think it is correct to say that he was
anxious that it should be published. ... he was still working at it as far as he was able,
and thinking of improvements until shortly before he died. ... No apology needs to be
made for publishing the essay in its present form. It is a characteristic piece of work,
written with the same sturdy elegance to which his readers are accustomed, showing no
signs of lack of vigor and ... exuding the same unaffected intellectual honesty which was
always one of the main strengths of his writing."
So writes Peter Winch in his preface. Winch has some substantial disagreements with Malcolm but reserves them for his own essay at the back. Malcolm's essay
consists of an introduction and seven chapters; a bibliography and index are included.
II
Malcolm begins: "When Wittgenstein was working on the latter part of the Philosophical Investigations, he said to his former student and close friend M. O'C. Drury:
'My type of thinking is not wanted in this present age; I have to swim so strongly against
the tide.' In the same conversation he said: 'I am not a religious man but I cannot help
seeing every problem from a religious point of view.' For a long time I have been
puzzled by this second remark. My understanding of Wittgenstein's thought seemed to
be threatened. For the 'problems' to which he was referring were not the problems of
poverty, disease, unemployment, crime, brutality, racial prejudice, war. .... The problems
he meant are philosophical: those very perplexities and confusions with which he
grapples in the Investigations."
Malcolm next offers a disclaimer: "I am going to present an interpretation of what
it could mean to say that there is, not strictly a religious point of view, but something
analogous to a religious point of view, in Wittgenstein's later philosophical thought." In
the following chapter, he unpacks the statement "I am not a religious man".
He begins by recounting anecdotal evidence from the memoirs of various people
(including himself, Drury, Pascal, and Rhees). These show that Wittgenstein had a
genuine and profound concern for what we call matters of conscience. He prayed,
made confessions, believed in a last judgement, had a stern sense of duty, and so on.
He once said to Drury, before Drury was to be sent to the front as a medic in WWII, "If it
ever happens that you get mixed up in hand to hand fighting, you must just stand aside
and let yourself be massacred."1
Malcolm next considers a number of remarks from Wittgenstein's journals, published in English as Culture and Value, which explicitly deal with such topics as Christianity, the Gospels, faith, the last judgement, the resurrection, and so on. Malcolm
writes:
"He thought that the symbolisms of religion are 'wonderful'; but he distrusted
theological formulations. He objected to the idea that Christianity is a 'doctrine' .... For
Wittgenstein, the emphasis on religious belief had to be on doing -- on 'amending one's
ways', 'turning one's life around' .... Once I quoted to him a remark of Kierkegaard which
went something like this: 'How can it be that Christ does not exist, since I know that he
has saved me?' Wittgenstein's response was: 'You see! It isn't a question of proving
anything!'"2
Malcolm notes that "his religious sense was Christian; but he distrusted institutions" [RPV, p. 21] and he refers to another remark Wittgenstein made to Drury: "...one
of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of
churches."3 "Wittgenstein had an intense desire for moral and spiritual purity," Malcolm
continues [RPV, p. 23], but never felt at home in any established religious institution,
church, or doctrine. "We can say with confidence that he knew the demands of religion"
[RPV, p. 23] Malcolm concludes; what he leaves unsaid is that one of the things that
troubled Wittgenstein throughout his life was the realization that he could not, or would
not, meet those demands: "I cannot kneel to pray," Wittgenstein wrote, "because it's as
though my knees are stiff."4
"Religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a
system of reference, ... a way of living..."5 Wittgenstein wrote. It must be no mere detail
in your life, but the purpose which informs it--otherwise it isn't religious, but something
else (however intensely you may feel it). Evidently Wittgenstein did not commit his life to
a system of reference, such as Roman Catholicism, and that is the sense in which he
was not a religious man.
Chapter Two of Malcom's book is a summary of the Tractatus. He concentrates
on logic, the Picture Theory of Meaning, and explanation in terms of simples and complexes. This would be fine if it led to some insights into the so-called mystical conclusion
of the Tractatus. It does not. Malcolm has nothing to say about the Tractatus on ethics,
the Mystical, the ineffability of the solution to the problem of life, the freedom of the will,
"God does not enter into the world", "the world of the happy is a different world from that
of the unhappy", and so on. That is consistent with the Tractatus, but it looks more like
an omission than a considered elucidation of the original.
Better summaries of Wittgenstein's logic are available, and Malcolm's is marred
by two blunders. On p. 36 he writes: "if the words of a sentence designated only complex things, and those complex things no longer existed, then the words would not
designate anything at all, and so the sentence would not have any sense." Malcolm has
got it wrong here. Sense is the logical possibility that the complex exists, not the fact
that it does; if the complex does not exist in fact, then the proposition is false, not
senseless. Furthermore, his account of elementary propositions assumes that they
consist only of names. This ignores the distinction Wittgenstein drew between names,
which have meaning (i.e., the objects they represent), and logical operators (if, and, or)
which have no meaning but which constitute the logical structure of the proposition
within which the names show how things stand. A language which consisted of names
with no logical operators would be a list of names, not a language.
Wittgenstein underwent a religious conversion or spiritual awakening while fighting on the Russian front in 1916. His entries in the Notebooks allow us to date the
experience exactly, during the period from 4 June 1916 until his meeting with Engelmann in October 1916. During this time Wittgenstein was writing into his notebooks
such things as "Fear in the face of death is the sign of a false life", "To believe in God is
to see that life has a meaning", "Ethics and aesthetics are one," "He who lives not in
time, but in the present, is happy. There is no death for those who live in the present."
and so on. These thoughts occurred to him while he was posted at the front during
some of the fiercest fighting, the Brusilov Offensive, in which some 200,000 Austrians
were captured by the advancing Russians. It was a time of extreme danger and horror,
and Wittgenstein distinguished himself more than once for conspicuous bravery. The
so-called mystical portions of the Tractatus all date from this time; the logical portions,
the Picture Theory of Meaning, and so on, were already complete before this time. It is
from Wittgenstein's own correspondence that we know that he had come across a copy
of Tolstoi's The Gospels in Brief and that it had "virtually kept him alive."6 A serious
discussion of the sense in which Wittgenstein might later have meant that he saw every
problem from a religious point of view, if it is to start with the Tractatus, ought to concentrate on the later 'mystical' conclusion of the Tractatus, not the earlier logic of it, and
might profitably proceed by investigating the possible or probable influences of Tolstoi's
The Gospels in Brief and Wm. James's The Varieties of Religious Experience on the
young Wittgenstein--or leave well enough alone. But Malcolm is determined to follow his
own course, and his discussion of the Tractatus turns out to be a tack in another direction before coming round to the point.
In Chapter Three, Malcolm jumps from the Tractatus to the Investigations and
takes up Wittgenstein's rejection of the notions that everything can be explained and
that an explanation ought to provide whatever it is that is essential or common to di-
verse phenomena (e.g., the general form of proposition, a complete analysis to absolute simples, and so on).
In Chapter Four Malcolm considers Noam Chomsky's theory that an innate
universal grammar, or hidden mechanism, must be supposed in order to account for
language acquisition. In the following chapter, he considers a number of other ordinary
phenomena, such as thinking, remembering, knowing what one was about to say before
one was interrupted, and so on, for which philosophers are often tempted to suppose
that they have adequate explanations (and he gives a variety of examples); Malcolm
dismisses them all as "failed explanations".
In his penultimate chapter, The Limit of Explanation, Malcolm outlines what
Wittgenstein proposed in place of philosophical explanation: 'look, don't think!', 'leave
everything as it is and just describe it', just accept that certain language-games are part
of our form of life and that this fact neither has nor needs any explanation, and so on.
I shall not offer a detailed critique of Malcolm's central chapters, since Winch
does this anyway in his own essay. I shall only remark that they offer something quite
different to what one was led to expect from Malcolm's title. The central five chapters
have little if anything to say about Wittgenstein's religious point of view or what
Wittgenstein might have meant by saying that he had one; a better title might have
been Wittgenstein on 'Explanation'.
Malcolm comes round to the point in his final chapter, Four Analogies: "In the
Introduction I indicated that there is a link between Wittgenstein's philosophical outlook
and a religious view of the world. This link is perhaps better called 'analogy' than 'resemblance'. The first analogy pertains to the concept of explanation: how it reaches a
limit, and when pressed further it loses its sense." He then considers the concept of
God (or a concept of God) as the point where certain kinds of explanations (reasonings,
justifications, and so on.) stop. "When overwhelmed by calamity, [people who believe in
God] arrive at a kind of reconciliation once they come to feel that [their] sufferings are
God's will. They would see no sense in asking why God willed these troubles to occur.
To speak of God's will is, for them, an end to explanation." [RPV, p. 84]
It is presumptuous to ask for God's reasons (Malcolm cites the Book of Job).
This is part of the Judeo-Christian concept of God: it is not that God needs no reasons
or justifications, but rather that this concept has a special role in the language-games of
explaining and justifying.7 "When Wittgenstein wrote that 'we must do away with all
explanation', this cannot be attributed to an eccentric dislike of explanations. The remark is an expression of Wittgenstein's conception of the peculiar nature of philosophy."
[RPV, p. 4] That is, it is not the task of philosophy to explain everything--this theme runs
throughout his work, from early to late. The task of philosophy is to cast into relief--to
show rather than attempt to state--the nature of our concepts (and of our occasional
misunderstanding of them). Wittgenstein did this by, among other things, demonstrating
that: (1) explanations (reasons, justifications, etc.) stop at an uncertain point (or an
uncertain grey area); (2) that it is not the same point in all cases, the point is different in
different contexts, and that reveals something about our concepts, for that is the point
where grammar meets essence8; and (3) that our concepts are often based not on a
priori principles but contingent facts ('just something we do'). But it is the peculiar nature
of philosophy (or perhaps the philosophical mind) to lead us to the point where explana-
tion stops, and then to tempt us to explain farther, to seek out, to invent, to confabulate,
First, Last, or Highest Principles why it must be so and cannot be otherwise. And that
too reveals something about our concepts--of philosophy and of what it is to explain
something. That is the gist of Malcolm's chapters on pseudo- and failed explanations,
namely, they all result from trying to explain too much, past the point where we should
stop. In Western philosophy, unlike Western religion, it is not thought impertinent to
continue asking questions where there are no answers9--or, what comes to the same
thing, there is no generally acknowledged point passed which there are no sensible
answers. 'God' is that point for theologians--but for philosophers, 'God is dead'. That is
something which Wittgenstein wished would change.10
Malcolm's point is well-taken, but it does not provide an insight into the sense of
Wittgenstein's remark that he could not help seeing problems from a religious point of
view. What it shows is that Wittgenstein viewed religious language-games in the same
way as other sorts of language-games, but not the sense in which his view of problems
(philosophical or otherwise) constituted a religious point of view.
Analogy is a finely tuned instrument, and unless it is played with virtuosity, the
result tends to be vague. Moreover, analogy is a weak solo instrument; it sounds better
as an accompaniment. As Anscombe once said, "Wittgenstein is highly resistant to
generalization." For an analogy alone to yield a definite insight into one of
Wittgenstein's more cryptic remarks, it is necessary to specify in what respects the
analogy holds and in what respects it does not. Perhaps this was self-evident to
Malcolm--alas, it is not to this reader. It is not self-evident that if one interprets
Wittgenstein's views on religion analogously to his views on philosophy, language, and
explanation, then one will understand what Wittgenstein meant by saying that he saw
problems from a religious point of view. It may yet turn out that that is the correct interpretation--or one of several fruitful interpretations--but Malcolm's essay does not establish that.
Malcolm's essay, ostensibly about Wittgenstein on religion, concentrates on
everything but the obvious: it concentrates on Wittgenstein's early Picture Theory of
Meaning, the metaphysics of objects and atomic facts, and so on, and, in Wittgenstein's
later work, on his struggle against faulty explanations and pseudo-explanations. Of
Wittgenstein's so-called mysticism in the Tractatus-period, there is not a whisper. Of the
"ethical point" of the Tractatus (as Wittgenstein himself insisted in a letter to Ficker),
Malcolm makes no mention. He barely mentions the "Lecture on Ethics" [1929] (and his
remark that wonder at the existence of the world is "analogous" to being struck by the
peculiarities of certain language-games, is properly qualified by Winch later on). These
are the obvious places to start unpacking the question, what Wittgenstein might have
meant by "a religious point of view". If these items are not clear enough, if it should be
necessary, further, to go poking around in the man's private life for clues to interpret
these items, then the next places to start looking are the influences on the young
Wittgenstein of Tolstoi, Wm. James, Schopenhauer, and Weininger. Malcolm, unfortunately, offers no insight on these points; for such insights, the reader is better advised to
turn to Engelmann's Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir, and Ray Monk's
biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius.
Malcolm proposes further analogies, but they are little more than adumbrations.
One is based on the observation that "there is something wrong with us" [RPV, pp. 87-
90]. He relates Wittgenstein's remark that "People are religious in the degree that they
believe themselves to be not so much imperfect, as ill"11, to the idea, common in
Wittgenstein's later philosophy, that philosophy is a kind of therapy to cure philosophers
of the disease of philosophy (symptoms of which include pseudo-explanations, hidden
mechanisms, spurious arguments, and so on). But, Malcolm cautions, "the analogy
between the sickness of the spirit that is of religious concern and the intellectual diseases that philosophy would like to heal must not be exaggerated. The analogy only
means that in both cases something is wrong with us--on the one hand, in the way we
live and feel and regard others; and on the other hand, in the way we think when we
encounter a philosophical question."12 Unquestionably, philosophical temptation is a
large and significant topic in Wittgenstein's work. There is, however, an important
disanalogy here, as Winch points out, in that the philosopher is, in principle, able to cure
himself by his own intellectual effort; whereas, in the Judeo-Christian tradition (although
not in the Buddhist tradition), the original sinner is not able to attain salvation by his own
effort, and it is not, in any case, an intellectual endeavor.
Malcolm's final analogy is based on the observation that, in Wittgenstein's later
philosophy and especially in On Certainty, language-games ultimately come down to
actions, not thoughts, explanations, or principles. 'Analogously', Wittgenstein's view was
"that what is most fundamental in a religious life is not the affirming of creeds, nor even
of prayer and worship--but rather, doing good deeds--helping others in concrete ways,
treating their needs as equal to one's own, opening one's heart to them, not being cold
or contemptuous but loving." [RPV, p. 92] Hereagain, I would say that the analogy is
valid, as far as it goes; however, what it shows is that Wittgenstein tended to view two
things in the same way, but not the sense in which that way of viewing things could or
should be called religious. There is nothing specifically religious about the observation
that language-games, as well as religious rituals, are ultimately based on cultural practices rather than on theories and explanations.
III
Winch's "Discussion of Malcolm's Essay" offers a detailed critique of many of
Malcolm's points. Moreover, Winch, with characteristic precision, puts his finger on a
problem in Malcolm's whole essay, namely that of offering an "analogy". As Winch
writes, "By most people's standards Wittgenstein was obsessively precise about the
way he expressed himself. ... he did not speak of an 'analogy' between philosophical
and religious problems, but of 'seeing every problem from a religious point of view'."
[RPV, p. 97] What Wittgenstein might have thought a religious point of view consisted in
is the question Malcolm's title poses, but which his analogies persistently dodge, and
Winch takes him to task for it.
As for Malcolm's account of Wittgenstein on explanation, Winch adds the important qualification that "Wittgenstein never thought that convincing the philosopher that
explanations come to an end would be enough to stop the obsessional insistence on
asking unanswerable questions. The real work that had to be done was to make clear
the misunderstanding from which that insistence arose." [RPV, p. 103] I agree completely. Moreover, as Winch rightly points out, different kinds of explanations come to
different kinds of ends, in religion, in philosophy, in science, in everyday life, and what
we do when we reach those ends is different in the different cases; Malcolm tends not
to take this into account and thereby vitiates much of the force of his analogies.
What Wittgenstein sought through philosophy was not, as Malcolm would surely
have agreed, a First, Last, or Highest Principle (like Descartes's Cogito), or a rationalization of prima facie irrational habits (as Kant had sought to defuse the radical skepticism of Hume), or a justification or foundation for any theory (as Kant had tried to found
ethics on pure reason, and as Russell and Hilpert had tried to found mathematics on
logic). As Wittgenstein already realized in the Tractatus-period, the whole project of
trying to insert foundations under things is profoundly misguided: "Logic must take care
of itself" he declared, and that means that it needs no foundations. Of course,
Wittgenstein pondered over philosophical puzzles and often gave explanations (of a
sort) of how such puzzles had arisen; this was essential to his method, but it was never
his objective. What Wittgenstein sought through philosophy was something like the
ataraxia of Pyrrho: not an explanation of how and why the facts came to be, but a clear
overview of what the facts are--in order to achieve peace, in order to put an end to
certain kinds of philosophical questions which trouble the mind and bring philosophy
itself into question.13
This is "against the tide" of traditional methods and objectives in academic philosophy; thus, we may take Wittgenstein's remark to Drury, that his type of thought was
not wanted, together with the remark that he saw problems from a religious point of
view. Malcolm, apparently, did not see any connection between these two remarks.
Winch does, and cites the Preface Wittgenstein wrote to the Philosophical Remarks: "I
would like to say, 'this book is written to the Glory of God', but nowadays .... it would not
be correctly understood. It means the book was written in good will, and so far as it was
not but was written from vanity etc., the author would wish to see it condemned. He
cannot make it more free of these impurities than he is himself." Winch is right to connect these remarks, and this supports his contention, contrary to Malcolm, that the
problems Wittgenstein claimed to see from a religious point of view were not only philosophical problems (such as what a proposition is, or where explanation stops). Further
such remarks supporting Winch's contention may be found throughout Culture and
Value.14 If we also add Kraus's remark, known to Wittgenstein, that 'half a man cannot
utter a whole sentence', then we begin to see how the vocation of philosophy could
have been connected, for Wittgenstein, with matters of conscience or with a
religious point of view not bound to any particular religious tradition or church. In 1946
Wittgenstein wrote: "Understanding oneself properly is difficult, because an action to
which one might be prompted by good, generous motives is something one may also be
doing out of cowardice or indifference. Certainly, one may be acting in such a way out of
genuine love, but equally well out of deceitfulness, or a cold heart. Just as not all gentleness is a form of goodness. And only if I were to submerge myself in religion could all
these doubts be stilled. Because only religion would have the power to destroy vanity
and penetrate all the nooks and crannies."15 Pace Malcolm’s claim that Wittgenstein
placed more emphasis on doing good than on prayer, I would say that Wittgenstein’s
understanding of religiosity focused on the interior life, and actions (such as doing good
to others) were relevant as indicators of the interior life.
His religious point of view seems to have had little or no content--Drury neatly
described this as "intellectual asceticism": Wittgenstein consistently pared away all that
was inessential from his 'mysticism', from his religious point of view, from his ethic. That
is, he pared away all doctrine, all dogma, all argument, all theory--and was left with: a)
ineffability (what can only be shown, not said), b) a form of life (as Malcolm somewhat
simplistically said, doing rather than thinking and explaining), and c) a rigorous sense of
duty and a relentless desire to purge himself of all vestiges of "vanity, etc." He was vain
about his intellectual abilities16 and about his writing style in the Investigations, and yet
many remarks published in Culture and Value betray repeated doubts about the originality of his thinking.17 These are some of the places where one ought to look for clues
to the sense in which Wittgenstein saw problems (philosophical and otherwise)
from a religious point of view, from a point of view in which his own troubled conscience
was always reflected and always in danger of betraying itself as half a man trying to
utter a whole sentence.
Winch offers an analogy of his own, between architecture and philosophy. He
cites two remarks in which Wittgenstein connects architecture with gesture.18 To understand a gesture is to catch a glimpse of the character of the one who makes it, "and if I
am wrong about that, then I am wrong about the character of the gesture", Winch
writes. He continues: "Wittgenstein's comparison between architecture and philosophy
suggests we may say something similar about the relation between a piece of philosophical work and its author. And clearly he himself invites us to do so in the passage
from the Preface to the Philosophical Remarks. [quoted above] ... His philosophical
work was for him one of the most important expressions of his life (the scene, as it
were, of some of his most important 'gestures'). It is to be expected therefore that there
should be a religious dimension to his work."19
What happened to Wittgenstein's early 'mysticism' of the Tractatus-period? Did
he simply outgrow it? Was it merely a youthful idealistic phase he went through? Did the
accumulation of adult experience and wisdom eventually bring about the ascendance of
a more earthy pragmatism and the gradual lapse of his youthful idealism? On the face
of it, the development of Wittgenstein's philosophical work suggests just such an interpretation: the Investigations rejects all the idealistic metaphysics and transcendent
ethics of the Tractatus and puts in their place a pragmatism immersed in ordinary,
mundane, earthy detail. The Investigations has nothing whatever to say of an ethical,
much less mystical or transcendent, nature.
But another interpretation has been suggested, by, among others, Drury,
Malcolm, and Winch, namely that Wittgenstein's early 'mysticism' was enriched and
broadened through experience, and that its ineffability was even more rigorously observed than before. The clues are to be found scattered among his miscellaneous
remarks and in the memoirs of those who knew him. I agree with the second interpretation, but readily admit that the difficulty of substantiating it is formidable.
In Sum
Malcolm's essay has a lot more to say about Wittgenstein on explanation than on
religion. Winch's qualifications of Malcolm's remarks on explanation are well-taken.
Malcolm offers anecdotal evidence of Wittgenstein's view of religion, but for insights into
Wittgenstein's religious point of view, the reader is better served by Winch's commentary. Winch's contribution alone is worth the price of admission.
NOTES
1. Rush Rhees ed., Recollections of Wittgenstein, Oxford, 1984, p. 163. In WWI
Wittgenstein was not such a pacifist: he volunteered for the post of artilleryman. What is
the difference between killing people with a bayonet and with cannon fire?
2. Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? [hereafter: RPV], Cornell University
Press, 1993, p. 19.
3. Rhees, ibid., p. 129.
4. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, [hereafter CandV], tr. by Peter Winch, Basil
Blackwell, 1980, p. 56:1.
5. Wittgenstein, CandV, p. 64:4.
6. Wittgenstein, letter to Ficker, 24.7.15.
7. Wittgenstein, CandV, p. 50:6: "The way you use the word 'God' does not show whom
you mean, but rather what you mean."
8. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations [hereafter: PI], Macmillan, Third Edition, tr.
by G.E.M. Anscombe, 371: "Essence is expressed by grammar."
9. In the Buddhist tradition also, the story is often told of a master who strikes a pupil for
asking too many questions.
10. See Wittgenstein, CandV, pp. 61:1, 61:5, and especially 61:4: "I am by no means
sure that I should prefer a continuation of my work by others, to a change in the way
people live [sic--not merely think] which would make all these questions superfluous."
11. Wittgenstein, CandV, p. 45:6.
12. RPV, p. 89.
13. Wittgenstein, PI 133.
14. See, for example, Wittgenstein, CandV, pp. 16:5, 33:2, 35:7, 48:1, 49:4, 65:3: "...the
greatness of what a man writes depends on everything else he writes and does."
15. Wittgenstein, CandV, p. 48:1, my italics.
16. "I am a very vain person" he said to Bouswma, cited by Ray Monk, Ludwig
Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, The Free Press (Macmillan), 1990, p. 554.
17. Wittgenstein, CandV, p. 18-19 (Jewishness), 36:5, 53:2, p. 59-60 (taste), 63:3, 65:5,
72:5, 75:8.
18. Wittgenstein, CandV, pp. 22:7, 42:9.19. RPV, p. 132.